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Good slug, bad slug, ugly slug

As a diversion from what I really should be doing, here is an update on how my manure gardening efforts are going.

While my neighbors here on Queen Anne availed themselves of pickup loads of free composted manure from Edensgate Farm and industriously dug it into the soil, I have simply been watering my seedlings and hardening them off – this means rescuing them from the occasional deluge or cold night, though we haven’t had an actual frost in at least three weeks.

Now that Mother’s Day has past, it should be safe to move them outside permanently. Yesterday evening I filled a few spare 5-gallon buckets with manure, but realized I probably don’t want to transport it without lids…. If I had to brake suddenly, there could be an unfortunate consequence. While I do subscribe to the “that barn smell is my aromatherapy” school of thought, I don’t want to actually be picking it out of every corner of the car.

So this morning I will be stopping at grocery stores looking for used five gallon buckets with lids on my way to the barn. The plan is to try some upside-down tomatoes this year as well as some grown more conventionally. This video from the Oregonian gives one way of doing this and covers some other tomato issues.

My own method is going to be a little less different because I have small homegrown seedlings, not big greenhouse-grown ones, and they are not using barn byproducts. You put them in the buckets via a hole cut in the bottom, let them establish a good root system right way up (this is where a lid comes in), and then hang them by their handles and let them reverse direction up the sides of the buckets. The lids are handy for keeping in moisture too.

I have seen upside-down trees – an installation at Mass MOCA by Natalie Jeremijenko, described as an “artist-experimenter.” My tomatoes will be strictly lowbrow and intended for consumption – but this system seems like an excellent defense against that most voracious of Pacific Northwest grazers, the slug.

Aftere chatting with Cathy last night about how her own vegetable gardening efforts had been discouraged by gastropod attacks, I sat on the bench in the aisle near the front of the barn and prepared Willy’s feed bags for the next couple of weeks, modest amounts of alfalfa pellets, oats and black oil sunflower seeds, plus a mineral/hoof supplement and feed-through womer. This means lining up the various plastic containers in a row for assembly-line efficiency. After finishing, I picked one up and found Jabba the Hut stuck on the side of one – a fat, short yellow-green slug.

I flicked Jabba off with a shudder. This morning, I can still feel that instinctive loathing, but I can be a little more dispassionate and I actually wondered which species of slug he was. My knowledge of slug taxomy is limited to “red ones,” “black ones” (which I have seen polkadotting a stand of buttercup) and of course the famous “banana slugs.”

I didn’t know that some slugs are actually predators, eating earthworms and also each other. It’s a jungle out there!

Many are exotics that have been introduced – the “red ones” are the European red slug, Arion rufus L, apparently.

The bucket invader might have been a young banana slug, of which there are several species, apparently : Ariolimax columbianus (Gould); A. dolichophallus; and A. californicus
I flicked it off too quickly to see whether it had the characteristic keel along the top. Our inclination not to touch slugs is a good thing – their slime can carry potentially harmful parasites, according to the OSU site.

The intruder could also have been a young Great Grey Garden Slug, Limax maximus – in which case I should have rehomed it more carefully. These relative speed demons four times faster than a banana slug) are predatory on other slugs.

On the plus side, those grazing slugs eat broadleaf plants, so they do help to control weeds in pastures – like those “black ones” that like buttercup so much.

Surrounding your earthbound tomatoes with something gritty, like crushed eggshell or gravel, is supposed to be a slug deterrent too, but I can’t vouch yet for how effective it is. I may try it with the pumpkins, though!

If you want to learn more, this site from helps to identify all the “Terrestrial Gastropods” (as opposed to Marine, I suppose, not Extraterrestrial) of the Columbia Basin – that includes snails as well as slugs.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.